Black Hair History

This is a work in progress to say the least. I am by no means an expert in this history, but rather am sharing my research as I work through it. 

500 B.C.

Black hairstyling can be traced back as early as 500 B.C. with artwork showing African women in twists and other elaborate hairstyles (Adwumi 10).

1400's

Early 15th-century hair functions as a carrier of complex language and messages in West African societies, and these West Africans were the ones filling the slave ships to the "New World." These styles could indicate marital status, age, religion, ethnicity, wealth, rank, clan membership, etc. (Byrd 2).

Hair is not purely cosmetic for the West African people, for many tribes hair is seen as having heightened spiritual qualities, and as housing a person's spirit. Hairdressers were special to the community and complicated grooming could last hours or days (Byrd 5).

1500's

Europeans begin serious slave trade in the early 1500s which lasted nearly 400 years and resulted in an estimated 20 million people being stolen from their homes and dragged to market and sold. Often their heads were shaved for "sanitary reasons" but the effect was to begin erasing the slaves' culture (Byrd10).

1600's

In 1619 first slaves were brought to British North America (Byrd 11).

Slaveholders in the British mainland colonies seem to have allowed African Americans to style their hair as they pleased. In the slave systems of the New World, of course, they lacked both the time and the tools they were used to and as a result, slaves' hair often became tangled and matted (White, 49-50).

1700's

Some eighteenth-century owners resorted to hair cropping, or shaving the head, as a form of punishment (White 50).

Slaves who worked closely with the White family often styled their hair in an imitation of whatever style was in fashion for their White owners. But some in order to appear neat and tidy braided the hair tightly to the scalp in imitation of traditional African styling (Byrd 13).

In the eighteenth century, it was fashionable for White men of the upper class to wear wigs. As a result, some Black slaves took to wearing wigs as well, others shaped and styled their own hair to look like a wig (Byrd 13).

Descriptions of Black hair from runaway slave postings in the early 1700s use the term "wooly" but also describe elaborate haircuts and styles that seem to suggest a lot of pride and creativity in the styling of their hair. Some descriptions also note that light-skinned runaway slaves shaved their heads to pass as white (Byrd 12).

1800's

In 1808 Transatlantic slave trade is outlawed and the appearance and health of a slave owner's slave becomes important for status and for selling slaves later, so time for personal grooming (and church) is granted. Sunday becomes a day of trading grooming services, products, and tips (Byrd 16).

In the early 1800s Black women used "mammy legs", known, to most now as a stocking cap, and grease to help keep their hair flat on their heads (Adwumi 10)

Skin color/hair texture hierarchy develops and hair begins to be thought of in terms of "good" and "bad" (Byrd 18).

In pre-Civil War era America, Slave ran and even free Black-owned barbershops catered only to White elites. White slave owners trained their slaves to style hair and often lent them out to other White families. Free Black women began to make and sell hair and beauty products and style fellow Black women's hair out of their homes (Byrd 71-72).

1865 emancipation brings the challenge of fitting in with or existing alongside the White majority. Anything the Black people had or did to excess was subject to scrutiny or worse. Black women who wore their hair straight were seen as well-adjusted by White society (Byrd 21).

The emulation of White beauty standards becomes a way to make White people feel less threatened and to counter some of the negative stereotypes Whites had of Black people (Byrd26).

Interracial discrimination begins when light-skinned Black people who had been living free since before emancipation do their best to distance themselves from the newly freed or "sot free" emancipated Blacks. One way this interracial segregation was managed was by comb tests to see if the hair could easily be combed, if so, membership in a club or church was granted. (Byrd 21).

In southern antebellum areas hair care remained much the same, with sharecropping and other work all week, and self-care on Sundays. In the North, however, some had more access to professional salons and hair care products sold in stores (Byrd 22).

In 1875 the Marcel curling iron was popularized and its invention marks the first time a heat styling tool was popular with White society (Ruff 26).

Advertisers--both White and Black--use the idea that lighter skin and straighter hair are better to sell hair straighteners and skin lighteners that promised not just to enhance one's beauty but to improve one's station in life. "You owe it to yourself, as well as to others who are interested in you, to make yourself as attractive as possible. Attractiveness will contribute much to your success--both socially and commercially," read a late-nineteenth-century advertisement for Curl-1-Cure hair preparations. The products being sold, like arsenic wafers for lightening the skin and lye for straightening the hair, were often dangerous chemical concoctions that not only failed to perform miracles but could prove deadly(Byrd 22).

In 1888 after becoming suspicious of the chemicals used in commercial shampoo and hair products, Martha Matilda Harper developed her own hair tonic. She eventually opened a salon, the Harper Method Shop, invented the first reclining shampoo chair and was the first to develop the idea of clients visiting a hair salon. Prior to the Harper Method Shop, women cared for their own hair at home, or by beauticians who made house calls (Chiarelli).

1900's

As the twentieth century dawned, Whites forced Black women almost entirely out of the field of serving White clients, and specialty shops dedicated to Black hair care by Black entrepreneurs proliferated (Blackwelder 11)

In 1902 Black female entrepreneur Annie Turnbo Malone opened up the Poro company which sells Black hair care products for smoothing and straightening and trains other Black women to use them and sell them. In 1918, she built a million-dollar complex that housed a factory and cosmetics school. Poro College offered employment, lodging, and education and also provided a meeting place for Black organizations and individuals who were unable to access most public areas at the time (Byrd 32).

Sarah Breedlove McWilliams Walker better known as Madame C.J. Walker revolutionized the hair industry by retooling what is now the modern-day hot comb as well as launching a line of products that helped straighten women's hair. Walker's products were so popular, she became one of the first Black self-made millionaires (Adwumi 10).

In 1906 the first permanent wave machine is invented. This huge multi-armed machine used electrical current to curl the hair and often resulted in electrical shock, or heat burns, but still, the perm is popular throughout the 1900s (Ruff 29).

In the early 1900's it is estimated that in any given year, between ten and thirty thousand Blacks engaged in acts of "passing" as white (Byrd 27).

In the early 1900's wealthy Blacks created the image of the "New Negro" where success was defined by education, love of the arts, music, domesticity, etc. (Rooks 80). Hair was essential to the construction of this image, and how one Black individual presented was seen to affect the image of all Blacks (Byrd 28-30).

In the early 1900s, there was also opposition to Black adherence to a White standard of beauty. Booker T. Washington, Nannie Burroughs, and later W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, and others publicly opposed the act of straightening Black hair (Byrd 37-38).

1920s

Before WWI, beauty salon owners trained their employees through in salon apprenticeships. By 1920 salons that did this regularly had begun calling themselves schools and charging for it even though there was no formal training regimen (Blackwelder 8).

Southern states adopted segregated cosmetology exams from the beginning, and northern states gradually implemented differing standards by race (Blackwelder 8).

In 1916 Black beautician Nobia A. Franklin developed homemade hair products and began her career by opening a salon in Fort Worth. Shortly after, she founded the Franklin School of Beauty Culture in Houston. By the early 1920s, nearly 500 students had graduated from her beauty school ready to pursue careers in cosmetology.

In 1917 Madame C.J. Walker began to get her system of hair treatment into the curriculum of vocational colleges catering primarily to African American students (Rooks 91).

In 1909 Garret A. Morgan creates the first chemical relaxer providing more permanent solutions to hair straightening. The composition of current chemical straighteners has not changed much from their original recipes (Adwumi 10).

By the 1920s Black hair care businesses were ubiquitous and thriving, in Chicago alone, there were 211 barbers and 108 beauty salons registered with the city (Byrd 80)

In 1921, Charles Meeker Kozlay, publisher of American Hairdresser, organized a national association meeting and five hundred inaugural members signed the Charter of the National Hairdressers Association (NHA). The group's intent was to craft a hairdresser's textbook, an insignia, a code of ethics, access to liability and malpractice insurance for all members, and most importantly, affect legislative issues (Ruff 36).

In the 1920s and early 1930s, White Cosmetology schools begin to crop up in many states across the U.S. Many of these are in response to the demand for more complicated services like bob haircuts, permanent waves, and hair coloring services (Ruff 5).

1930s

In 1930 In Los Angeles, Ca, Hazel Dell Williams started the first cosmetology school for Blacks west of the Mississippi River. She also founded the California Cosmetology Legislative Education Committee, a lobbying organization in Sacramento for black beauticians (L.A. Times).

The 1930s call for licensure of beauticians resulted in freestanding schools of beauty whose instructors also had to be licensed by the state (Blackwelder 8).

the beauty salon was so pervasive in white and in black neighborhoods by 1930 that state legislators began to call for their regulation and an inspection process that would safeguard clients' health (Blackwelder 147).

The adoption of state beauty codes necessitated the creation of licensed schools to prepare beauty operators for their trade, and these certified schools were virtually, if not legally, racially segregated from the beginning. The formal training required to become a licensed beautician in the 1930s was brief, generally one thousand hours of instruction. The cost of cosmetology instruction was low, the Franklin School charged seventy-five dollars for the complete course in 1935. The comparatively low fees nonetheless posed a real and substantial obstacle to the daughters of impoverished communities still in the throes of the Great Depression (Blackwelder 147).

While African Americans also disproportionally maintained barbering and hairdressing businesses, they had less representation in these areas than in trades where patrons of both races sought their services without inhibition. While some white men continued to frequent African American barbershops in 1935, virtually no white women darkened the doorways of African American beauty salons (Blackwelder 10).

In 1931, the Research Bureau, of the Royal Institute in New York City, surveyed the accidents caused by permanent weaving machines and recommended regulation and training for the industry. Around the same time the desire to look like Jean Harlow led women to color their hair, but the chemicals used to create the high-lift blonde color caused headaches, eye-swelling, and blisters. Many hairdressers were sued for the pain they caused their clients and were dropped from their insurance companies. (Ruff 30-31).

In 1934, Henry M. Morgan established Tyler Barber College in Tyler, TX. It was the first national chain of barber colleges for African Americans. The school grew rapidly until close to 80% of all black barbers in America received training at Morgan's schools (Goodrich).

Between 1900 and 1945 the beauty industry grew rapidly into a major sector of the African American economy. Racial segregation limited the prospects of black enterprises, but racism also sheltered African American businesses somewhat from white competition within African American markets. White-owned cosmetic firms had little or no experience in meeting the needs or the market tastes of African American consumers, and white hairdressers refused to serve women of color (Blackwelder 14)

1940's

By 1940 all 48 states had passed laws regulating the training and licensing of beauticians and setting standards for sanitary conditions in shops

In the mid-1940s after the Great Depression weakened Black beauty product businesses, White manufacturers established themselves as key players in the hair game (Byrd 80).

In the late 1940's hair pieces called "falsies" became popular again and more than four million Black women bought an average of two falsies a year (Byrd 44).

1948: Mexican chemist Jose Calva discovers that the same process that turns sheep's wool into mink-like fur can turn kinky hair straight (Byrd 176).

1950's

From the 1950s on, weaves, wigs, and other extensions helped aid Black women in hairstyling. During this time period, straight hair was held up as the ideal, with pressures from both within the Black community and outside to uphold this standard of beauty (Adwumi 10).

In 1954 Black entrepreneur George Johnson created a chemical straightener that can be used at home by the consumer (Byrd 82).

By the 1950s the salon trade and the beauty school remained segregated through the 1950s. Segregated salons and schools followed patterns that both law and custom had earlier set in place. Some states had schools that were not segregated, but their exams were separated by race with students choosing to either take the Black hair care exam or the white hair care exam (Blackwelder 31).

1960's

Even after legalized segregation ended in the 196os, beauticians nationwide continued to cater largely to women of one race. African American women again began to practice in shops that attracted white women, but racial crossover in salon employment and in customer base remains very small today. Partly because women of color spend disproportionally more on beauty care than do white women, the African American hair trade continues to be more attractive to black beauticians than does employment with white clients. Indeed one of the few institutions as segregated as the church is the beauty parlor. Nevertheless, the civil rights movement improved the status of beauticians of color, many of whom had fought long and hard for equal rights (Blackwelder 140).

In the late 1960's the Afro became popular and many members of the Black Power Movement wore their natural hair out in an afro, embracing their natural textures for the first time. The hairstyle quickly became known as a symbol of Black power and defiance with activists like Angela Davis, Nina Simone, and Nikki Giovanni at the forefront, wearing it as a radical statement of pride (Byrd 53). Afros not only signified a change in hairstyle preferences, but they also signified the rejection of dominant ideas of beauty seen in western culture (Adwumi 10).

In 1969 Angela Davis's image was put out by the FBl. "Warning: Afroed and dangerous" (Byrd 176).

1970's

In 1972, Black model and Actress Cicely Tyson wore an Afro on a magazine cover, as well as cornrows on TV marking the first time natural Black hair had been celebrated in mainstream media.

In the late '70s came a new Black hair trend, the Jheri curl – a style promoting curly hair with defined ringlets rather than kinks (Byrd 86).

1980's

In 1981 Renee Rogers was fired from American Airlines for wearing cornrows. She is not alone in facing discrimination in the workplace for wearing cornrows or braids to work. Meanwhile, Bo Derrek is popularizing the style with white women (Byrd).

In the late '80s into the 1990s Hip-Hop culture invites creativity in short barbered styles and hightop fades (Byrd 113) as well as in longer asymmetrical or stacked looks, both receiving their fair share of straightening, relaxers, and bright colors (Byrd 116).

The late '80s also began the era of the modern weave (Byrd 118).

1990's

The 90s represented what "The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color in a New Millennium", calls the neo-soul era, which was marked by a variety of hairstyles from naturals and shortcuts to weaves and relaxers (Adwumi 10).

2000's

In 2001 Historically Black institution Hampton University prohibits male MBA students from having cornrows or locs. Dean of the Business School Sid Credle says he wants the men to look professional so they can get jobs.

Begins a rebirth of natural hairstyles and natural hair care (Adwumi10).

The early 2000s brings the era of #teamnatural and people doing "The Big Chop'' which involves cutting off all of one's previously relaxed hair (Byrd 180).

2021 Louisiana's Board of Cosmetology passed a resolution to require all licensing exams to include a section on cutting textured hair,